‘IT serves as the brain for telecom service providers’

Rajeev Batra, CIO, MTS India, is perhaps one of the finest technologist Indian telecom industry has at present. He believes that his role is not limited to the role of a CIO, and feels business decisions have to be influenced and evaluated by the usage of technology to a great extent. In his prior stints, convincing Bharti Airtel to go for an outsourced model for its IT infrastructure and processes was one of his biggest contributions to the industry. He speaks on the challenges faced by the telecom operators and the means to tackle them. Excerpts-

Considering telecom as an enterprise, which are the new ICT trends in sight?In telecomunication, IT serves as the brain for telecom service providers. Being a technology-centric business, it requires a lot of automation and cutting-edge technology. In addition, the industry needs to continuously adapt to it to be at the forefront.

One of the key trends that is becoming the focus areas is business intelligence analytics (BI/BA). BI/BA was in the market for quite some time, but it is gaining momentum now. It is being taken as the stepping stone for big data. We are also looking at new analytical CRMs, where we are more focused on customer segmentation. Then, another paradigm shift is marketing campaign, which is being used as a separate online customer gratification.

Besides, there will be the information and security concern, which is too critical, and one needs to keep on working on it which is mandated by regulatory as well. Lastly, there will be a pick in service models, being a telecom service provider we also offer public cloud service and not just limiting to private cloud.

How many terminals does MTS have in India?

Across India, we have 3,500 terminals and we also manage lot of application access that is taken care of by the distribution network, which is close to around 10,000 terminals. Besides in partner ecosystem, we even have a larger footprint accessing our application.We are spread across pan-India, with 2 major data centers, which are level-3 category data centers, in Noida and Chennai. They came up with green footprint and consume 15-20 % less power as compared to traditional data centers and PUE are pretty good compared to the industry
standard.

What is the size of these data centers and what are the green initiatives you have taken so far?

The data center occupies an area of around 41,000 square feet. We have 3 levels of power back ups. We have used the services of one of the best vendors, who has lot of patents in designing green data centers, to get our data centers designed. So there is a whole lot of permutation and combination that goes in the placement of these systems to reduce the carbon footprint.

Do you allow BYOD on your network?

It's a slightly unique case, we would like our employees to go the BYOD route but there are a lot of regulatory restrictions, and since we carry so much sensitive data we need to be very sure about the data being carried out. Even, we don't allow
snapshots to be carried out. Hence, as of now we have not allowed BYOD except for in very rare cases and that too to limited top management under supervision.

 

We still feel that there are few loopholes in BYOD as there can be a possibility of data leakage now, but we certainly see it
happening 2 or 3 years down the line.

What are the security issues with BYOD?

If you just allow anybody to come to the enterprise network, download anything he wants; take it back home, so it will just be an open-ended option for him to send data to private mails or to any other competitors. Now if I want to deploy BYOD, I would deploy a virtual desktop where people can come and keep segregation between private and official work. We also have to spend pretty good amount of money for the segregation. As of now, there are options where we provide this service of virtual desktop to our customers and currently on a small set up certainly it can be utilized, but when the spread is pretty huge the level of discipline required is pretty high.

Do you prefer the model of managed security services or you prefer in-house on-premise security solution?

We have a type of hybrid model where we take expertise from external parties even in the form of some services while some control we keep with ourselves. All the audits and certification are done by our team in concert with our audit and certification partner. So, yes partners are involved whether it's on the peripheral security or licensing option, so all these are managed internally along with our partners.
How does the management look at the CIO in their decision-making processes these days, and how have you managed to influence decisions?
Ten years back when I was with Airtel, I did Airtel-IBM outsourcing for IT, even that was a business decision, it was not a technology decision, though I agree there were technology components in it. I see IT more as a tool that business uses for market competitiveness or market differentiation or getting more revenues.

At MTS, I am a part of management committee and also we take quite an active role in business-decision making. If, IT is not involved in any business decision neither the business will get to know what additional technology they can provide to the customer to gain market share nor IT will be able to churn out solutions that will be in line with the over strategy and objective.